Gloomy Valentine

Gloomy Valentine is a short animation about 5mins long done with stop motion creations, I thought it was a moving little piece and quite enjoyed it, I stumbled upon it whilst looking for my next review muse and decided that I would share it with you, I like quite a lot of short movies, so perhaps in between my reviews for the weirder more wonderful features I could give little reviews on short movies that I find, the streaming site that I watch a lot of my films from seems to have quite the abundance of independent shorts.

Gloomy is a young woman who has been driven mad by the loss of her love and seems warped by her heartache,  we can only assume that she's dealing with the aftermath of a break-up because there is no indication that she lost her boyfriend through death. So we just get to see a sorrowful Gloomy dealing with her feelings about this break-up in her apartment. I really enjoyed it because it's quite relate able, it reminds me of a time when I went through a similar emotional period last year and the gothic "Tim Burtonesque"  feel to the animation is wonderfully haunting, the music is very beautiful too.

There's quite a lovely little scene where she's looking under the bed to find anything that will arouse her feelings of sadness, she chucks the rose that he gave her from underneath there and then she throws out a bottle that I assumed was of vodka and then she finds what she was looking for and that is a picture of them together. 

 

The pictures does just the trick and it stirs up the memories of more happier times and she sees their time together in a stark contrast to the bleak black and white flash back she had earlier whilst laying emotional-less in bed, the colours are far brighter in these scenes, juxtaposed to the gloomy reality that she is facing without him, it then hits her that she is left alone and you slowly watch as the bright memories fade and she starts to cry bringing her back to the dark bedroom.

 

 

The imagery in this short film I find quite pretty and wonderful, I've always been a big fan of stop motion animation and especially when it has this dark feel to it, seems to always work well. The ending of this short is quite surreal but poor Gloomy is eventually consumed by the darkness that she feels from inside her heart as she desperately tries to clutch the last feelings of her love back as it floats away from her.

I highly recommend that you give this little feature a watch - 

I will be reviewing more short movies soon and I'm currently going to start working on my bigger movie review soon, I have found one that has a subject matter that has been quite prevalent recently.  

Dolla Morte

Do you think you could persuade any actor in their right mind to do this?

So you sit down on a Wednesday afternoon and think what's the stupidest most outrageous shit I can watch, well it turns out to be Dolla Morte. The thought only occurred to me after I'd spent the night talking about Bill Zebub movies with my friend Newt, he mentioned about Dolla and said it was pretty funny, probably best watched drunk or stoned but I'll admit that I found it stupidly funny sober, we all know there's no hope for me.

Dolla Morte is kind of like a really warped and surreal sketch show that's very loosely tied together, it reminded me a lot of the randomness of the 'Robot Chicken' sketches but with far more sexual and controversial imagery. As you can tell from the screen captions the whole movie was made with dolls and plenty of other toys are utilised to full effect as well, it does make you question where did they get hold of all that shit? From the way it's done I think they filmed all the footage first and then did improvised voice acting over the top, the George W Bush impersonations are fairly amusing.

The beginning of this "comedy-horror" begins with a scene in which two cops are racing to save the one intrepid cop's wife from a serial killer, you just watch in disbelief as you see the action figures getting swept away down a river in a toy boat as they are arguing about whether or not they should have put the motor on and who's driving the thing, the boat gets stuck on the current, where it's then filmed just going round and round, "We seem to be in a whirlpool going round, we're fucking stuck" "Just have to let nature take its course"  after a few minutes they do start on their merry way down the river, meanwhile....

They'll never get you alive mwahahahaha

There is then a sequence that seems like it takes forever with the serial killer doll torturing and raping his female victim, they even went to the trouble of modifying the dolls so that they are anatomically correct with what looks to be modelling clay, it's like Bill Zebub thought how can I ruin every single person's childhood toys and memories in an hour and 8mins?

RIGHT IN THE CHILDHOOD!

The crack police team eventually get there and deal with the horny serial killer, if I'm honest this doesn't really have much to do with the rest of the movie, it's more like a little sub-plot parody of those kinds of 90s action movies like 'Kiss the Girls'  (is it bad how sexy I find Cary Elwes?)  for example where they are racing to save her at the end, you get to see a little bit more of the rampage the serial killer has been on whilst they hunted him down.

There is this surreal where a "police helicopter"  drops off a GI Joe rip off doll code name 'spanky' who discovers all the women that have been impaled by the plastic Ted Bundy, you get this scene with the tiny rip off GI Joe just staring up at all these Barbies and Brats dolls impaled on sticks.

Mother of god, somebodies younger sister is going to be fucking pissed 

The main story-lines of the movie, yes this does actually have a plot believe it or not, George.W.Bush is on a quest to drink Jesus' blood in order to gain mortality, it turns out this is because Jesus was the first ever vampire to walk this god forsaken planet, the other plot that runs parallel to this blood quest is Adolf Hitler (Captain if the SS Enterprise, most of the footage you see of him is in a modified Star Trek Enterprise toy) Osama Bin Laden (Which is just a Nosferatu doll modified with a beard) and Saddam Hussain are trying to take over the world with even more rip off GI Joes, which I think are called 'The Corps' dolls, I know a toy expert who watched this, he also picked out a Peter Parker doll from one of the later unrelated scenes which just show the doll jumping from a building claiming he can swing to the next one over.


This film is probably one of the hardest I've reviewed just based on the pure and simple fact that it's just such a mish mash of a production and grossly bizarre! The random off-topic scenes that I have spoken about along include a little stint where the prophet Mohammed shows up and offers his services to what appears to be a children's charity to which they reply reply to his request saying that they are a "non-profit" organisation, did you get it?! did that make you laugh?!

My fellow 'Mericians!

The scenes with George.W. Bush plotting against Jesus in order to acquire his blood are pretty funny, whoever is doing the voice impersonation is pretty good plus I always like when political figures are set-up! And this is just outrageous to say the least, as you can see from the top screen shot, Jesus owns up big time, Jesus also manages to defeat the Nazi in the SS Enterprise in a old school dog fight where Jesus flies rings around them on his crucifix, he also uses his crucifix as a pogo stick as an easier means of transport, I was beginning to think that Jesus would have made a fantastic character on the Whacky Races; Christ and his creative Crucifix, he'd exorcise The Gruesome Twosome, make Penelope Pitstop a nun, stop The Anthill Mob in their tracks by creating the image of the Virgin Mary on their car...I think I've digressed here.  

Holy jumping Jeebus Batman!

Jesus also gets attacked by a shark whilst he is demonstrating his almighty power to walk on water, which produces what could be a poignant moment in an 80s music video.

You've got to appreciate the skill involved in those overlapping effects

Osama Bin Laden features heavily in this movie, working out a way of he along with Saddam and Hitler in space can over throw the world, Dubya is too busy Jesus hunting to realise what is coming his way! There's this one sequence that just spun me out, it just shows Bin Laden fingering "corpses"  which are just a bunch of Barbies nailed to crosses naked whilst a heavy metal track rips through, I really wish I could have found a video of the scene, turns out not many people think this is genius enough to share with a wider audience, are you really surprised? I can't believe I'm 1. admitting to having watched this, 2. having found it pretty funny in places and 3. sharing both this information to the world. 

Well hello there, do you come here often? ;)

No, but she's going be coming here now

Osama bin Laden had his fingers in a lot of pies, terrorism, complicated games of hide & seek and Barbie's.

There's not much else that can be said about this film, I've come to the conclusion that Bill Zebub just love to take things that would be considered slightly offensive and make sure that they will differently offend somebody out there, even people like myself who enjoys a lot of dark comedy found myself kinda wincing at some of this movie, it's just so extremely over-the-top. I would highly recommend it if you are a fun of on the edge, low budget fringe cinema, best enjoyed with a couple of drinks and some buddies if you have more sense then me.

Dolla Morte also answers that age old question,  "Does the Pope shit in the woods?"

Why yes, yes he does.

If you want to experience this orgasmic action doll mind fuck, here's the link to the film in it's entire gory-

Dolla Morte (Full Movie)


You can also hear me talk about Dolla Morte on the up and coming episode of Asshat.